The event which is in front of her eyes: 1930s’ Scottish Highland and Islands life- the
documentary photography and film of M.E.M. Donaldson, Jenny Gilbertson and
Margaret Fay Shaw.
‘The event which is in front of her eyes’ comes from the following John Berger quote:
‘The photographer chooses the events he photographs. The choice can be thought of as a
cultural construction. The space for this construction is, as it were, cleared by his rejection of
what he did not choose to photograph. The construction is his reading of the event which is in
front of his eyes. It is that reading, often intuitive and very fast, which decides his choice of
the instant to be photographed’. [1]
For the purposes of this essay, I choose to imagine every ‘he’ of this quotation about a
photographer’s choice, reading and gaze, as ‘she’. What did Donaldson, Gilbertson and Shaw
see? Did they see their work as a ‘cultural construction’? How did they read the events in
front of them?
These women are not grouped together purely because of their biological gender. None were
native to the rural communities they photographed or filmed, with only Gilbertson being
Scottish by birth. [2] All chose independently to move to, and live over a substantial period of
time with the rural communities they were documenting. M.E.M. Donaldson left England to
build her own home on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula; Margaret Fay Shaw, an American,
moved from New York to live with the sisters Peigi [1874-1969] and Màiri MacRae [18831972] for six years at their croft at North Glendale, South Uist; and Jenny Gilbertson (née
Brown) went as a single woman to live on a croft in Shetland, in order to make films, then
settled there following her marriage to a crofter. None were formally trained in photography
or filmmaking. All taught themselves. All three had independent means [3], allowing them a
freedom of movement unusual for middle or upper class women for their time. It should be
noted that whilst women in the UK over 30 were given the vote in 1918, the age limit was
only lowered to that of men in 1928. All three women had initially gone against their families
wishes to move away and work independently. As Gilbertson wrote in later autobiographical
notes:
‘In fact, when I think of it, this independent streak was probably developing the hard way all
through my teens. My mother struggling to keep the Victorian idea of total obedience in a
daughter.’ [3]
Donaldson states a family lack of support, the strongest: ‘As regards to my literary and
photographic efforts, they received every discouragement… I had no influence whatever –
nor have I yet – to help me along and indeed in this and every other department of my
interests… I have had to fight alone with my back to the wall.’ [4].
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Unlike contemporaries such as Mary Field [1896-1968] or Evelyn Spice Cherry [1904-1990]
who co-produced and collaborated on films for governmental agencies, neither Donaldson,
Gilbertson nor Shaw was working within an institutional system. All were independents,
either trying to sell individual works (films, photographs or essays for publication in
magazines) in the cases of Shaw and Gilbertson, when they could, or making publishing
opportunities (Shaw and Donaldson). There is no evidence that the three women knew each
other, or each other’s photography or film work, in particular in the 1930s’. [5]
These are the similarities. This essay will also look at each one’s motivations for making the
work that they did; and how they represented the subject in front of their camera. Through
comparison of their work and processes to their better known male contemporaries who were
also documenting Scottish rural communities, I will frame their work in a wider national and
international context of the documentary photography and film making of the inter-war years.
Jenny Gilbertson
Jenny Gilbertson’s career as a film maker was in two parts; the first in the 1930s’ filming
aspects of Shetland life. She made one film ‘Prairie Winter’ (1934) with Evelyn Spice
Cherry in Canada. In the second part of her career, she recorded the lives of remote Inuit
communities in the Canadian Arctic. Her CV notes the reason for the lengthy break being that
during WW2: ‘She sold her Eyemo camera. She had two children to bring up and her
husband was invalided out of the army. She began teaching and taught for twenty years. In
the 1960s’ she began filming again.’ [6] What makes Gilbertson’s achievements even more
noteworthy are that her career break meant she had to learn two different systems as
technology expanded from cinema to broadcast. From making early connections with John
Grierson, the ‘father’ of the British Documentary movement; she then latterly had to navigate
television companies for her work to be shown via UK and Canadian Broadcasting
Corporations.
Gilbertson said that she: ‘...chose Shetland because I had been there many times on holiday,
graduating from being a mere tourist in a Hotel to being a real friend of a crofting family
and being one of themselves.’ [7] The first work she made, on an amateur 16mm Cine-Kodak
camera, was ‘A Crofter’s Life in Shetland’ (1931). This film is not character-led, unlike
Robert J. Flaherty’s [1884-1951] ‘Nanook of the North’ (1922), which follows one
protagonist or family. Rather, through an episodic format, utilising title cards to punctuate
and set the scene, Gilbertson’s camera roams for over an hour, across her subject matter of
Shetland people and place; showing different farming methods or different bird colonies, the
form of a day’s activity on the croft, the fishing boats bringing in their haul to Lerwick and
the subsequent getting the fish ready for market on the quay side. Significantly her film charts
a full year of life in Shetland, following the farming seasons. Gilbertson significantly roots
the crofter’s way of life alongside other events and life there, including a wedding on Fetlar,
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life in Lerwick, Shetland’s capital and ‘the loneliest men in Britain’ at Muckle Flugga
lighthouse, the furthermost point of Shetland. ‘A Crofter’s Life on Shetland’ is, in a sense,
Gilbertson’s magnum opus due to the sheer range of subject matter it covers. Finely observed
variation can be seen throughout, whether through different farming methods on the island, in
particular the activity of ploughing which shows examples of different combinations of
animal, through to just people working in a group to turn the land over. It is also shown in
particular with Gilbertson’s footage of bird colonies, types of bird, behaviours, nesting and
young, including herring gulls, cormorants, crows, kittiwakes, common guillemots, arctic
terms and fulmars. Gilbertson shows them in their natural habitat, populating the cliffs,
soaring in their hundreds in the sky, yet she also follows them as they crowd the boats
bringing in the catch, and also in one scene as adolescent gulls scramble over bread outside a
Lerwick bakers.
Gilbertson (or Jenny Brown as she was then), had edited ‘A Crofter’s Life in Shetland’ in
London then hired a studio to show it to John Grierson: “He was unknown to me, but several
people said he was the person to show it to...” [8] Grierson was impressed by the film,
writing for Gilbertson a forward for a programme [9] in 1932, commending her for, ‘being a
real illuminator of life and movement’. He went on to comment that ‘... [the film] gets down
to the life of the crofters and the fishermen and brings the naturalness out of it… In amateur
cinema, the people are always standing and staring and failing to be themselves. In
commercial cinema the people might as well be standing and staring for all the reality they
demonstrate. Miss Brown has already broken through the curse of artificiality.... I think the
best thing she did was to go straight to the crofters and live with them.” [10]
Grierson also recognised that her decision to spend real time in the crofting community in
order to capture a more realistic and detailed picture of everyday life: “She lived with them
round the seasons for a year, on the unique assumption that the dramatic unity of a crofter’s
life could not conceivably be the period of a six weeks’ summer holiday... You have to belong
if you are to catch the details of the daily round which make up the drama of people’s
existence”. [11]
On seeing it, John Grierson went on to encourage her to make a film with a narrative. ‘The
Rugged Island- A Shetland Lyric’ (1932), follows the story of a courting couple in a dilemma
as to whether they will carry on in the croft or emigrate. Gilbertson for this film worked with
the Shetland crofters she knew, her husband-to-be Johnny Gilbertson and the Clarks who she
had lodged with. Grierson went on to buy five of Gilbertson’s shorter documentary films for
the G.P.O Unit. These films, ‘Da Maakin o a Keshie’ (1932, 5 mins), Sheep’s Clothing
(1932, 10 minutes), ‘A Cattle Sale’ (1932, 3 mins), ‘Shetland Croft Life [Peat from hillside to
home]’ (1932, 6 mins) and ‘Seabirds in the Shetland Isles’ (1932, 9 mins) were all edited
from footage Gilbertson had taken from her first film. For ‘Seabirds in the Shetland Isles’,
Gilbertson camped alone with a tent and provisions on the uninhabited Isle of Stennis, to
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capture footage of bird species, including eggs hatching. In the latter part of the 1930s’ a
series of other short films, edited and produced by Cuthbert Cayley were also made from offcuts from her first film.
Gilbertson’s motivation was primarily for her films to be educational. She made lectures and
talks with her films, touring from the early 1930s’ until the end of her life. As well as touring
the work through lectures in Scotland and UK, Gilbertson also in 1934 forged her Canadian
network, through her first lecture series hosted by National Council of Education in the
winter of 1934-5, taking the lecture to ‘... Montreal, Ottowa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmunton,
Calgary and Vancouver, showing ‘Seabirds’ and ‘A Crofter’s Life in Shetland’, in public
halls, to Universities and to schools’ [12]. Interestingly, in reflection of this tour, Gilbertson
in later life noted that the invitation occurred due to the migration of many Scots to Canada,
giving an appetite for films about Scotland:
‘The previous year’s lectures had been advertised as being about some aspects of Britain and
Italy. Many Scots in Canada protested because Britain had been represented only by
England, so for the following year the Organising Secretary was looking for someone with a
lecture on some aspects of Scottish Life’. [13]
Over the course of career she wanted her films to be ‘edited for television and for educational
purposes, or they will lie in the vaults of the museum uselessly.’ [14]. ‘The museum’ refers to
films Gilbertson made for the Museum of Man in Ottowa, which held the negatives.
Gilbertson writes to one of the administrators Mr Shackell in a letter 19.1.89 that she wishes
access to the material to make a further series of films from it: ‘I am particularly anxious for
this to be done in my lifetime: otherwise it is possible these negatives and records will remain
buried in the vaults of the Museum for all time.” [15].
Margaret Fay Shaw
A trained musician, Shaw’s primary motivation to move from New York to South Uist in
1929 was to transcribe Gaelic songs at their source. She had spent periods in Scotland as a
teenager and in her early twenties [16]. In her own words, she ‘... chose South Uist, as the
island least visited by strangers and where there would be an opportunity to live amongst a
friendly and unprejudiced people not self-conscious of their unique heritage.’[17]. Early on
after her arrival on South Uist, she heard Màiri MacRae, who had been brought in from the
kitchen to sing to company at Boisdale House. She was invited by Màiri to learn the song by
visiting her at home in Glendale. On making the journey to the croft, which was two miles
from any road and easier accessed by boat, Shaw asked if she could lodge there with Màiri,
her son Donald and her sister Peigi. Over the next six years, Shaw transcribed the MacRae’s
songs and those of their neighbours, further learning Gaelic over this period too. Michael
Russell in his book ‘A Different Country: The Photographs of Werner Kissling’ attributes
Shaw’s knowledge of Gaelic- ‘almost unique[ly] amongst photographers who worked in the
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Hebrides’ - as a way ‘to penetrate Hebridean culture more thoroughly and to get closer to
the rhythms of place’. [18]
Like Shetland film maker Jenny Gilbertson, through the prolonged period of time spent living
on a croft, Shaw was highly aware of its seasons and cycle. She records both in her diary, her
transcript ‘The Outer Hebrides’ and subsequently in her life work ‘Folksongs and Folklore of
South Uist’ (1955):
The spring work of the croft began in February, when seaweed, used as fertilizer, was cut
with a saw-toothed sickle called a corran on the tidal islands of the loch at low water of a
spring tide’. [19]
The year closes with: 'All the harvest work done, the women wash and card the wool and
start the spinning wheels. It is the season for the fireside and the ceilidh, the rough weather
and the short days.’ [20]
Whereas Paul Strand was later to take single photographic portraits of South Uist islanders
over three months in the summer of 1954, Shaw over her six years there, focussed on this
single community and recorded it in detail. This rich material would be published in 1955 in
her significant work ‘Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist’. She also during this period
made trips to St Kilda, the Aran Islands and Mingulay, all of which she photographed. Her
essay ‘Hunting Folk Songs in the Hebrides’ was published in National Geographic Magazine,
whilst ‘St Kilda and the Last Summer’ was printing in Scots Magazine in 1980. Following
meeting the folklorist John Lorne Campbell [1906-1996] at Lochboisdale Hotel, they married
and she moved to Barra where he lived, in 1935, and then to Canna House on the Scottish
island of Canna by the end of the decade, where their home and archive is still maintained by
National Trust for Scotland. Shaw, like Gilbertson, also had a connection with Canada,
through her and her husband’s networks of music and Gaelic, in particular with Nova Scotia.
Shaw also took film of South Uist and Barra with her cine camera, but it remained unedited
by her, to be shown to those in the South Uist community and her networks.
MEM Donaldson
MEM Donaldson was the oldest of the three women - in 1930 she was fifty-four. Born in
England and brought up in Surrey, Donaldson travelled to Scotland repeatedly, to write the
first of her travel books, ’Wanderings in the Western Highlands and Islands’ (1921), and
‘Further Wanderings- Mainly in Argyll’, (1926). Her photographs were illustrations for her
books. She moved to her home which she designed, then had built in Sanna in 1927, on the
Ardnamurchan Peninsula. The house was complete with photography studio and she lived
there until 1947. In the 1930’s there were two further books, ‘The Country of Clan Ranald’
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(1931) and ‘Scotland’s Suppressed History’ (1935); the latter a diatribe on Presbyterianism in
Scotland. Donaldson’s photographs over this 1930s’ continued to be of the landscapes from
her walks, stones, crosses and other landmarks, crofters from the Scottish locations she
visited and those from the Ardnamurchan community. Donaldson also photographed those
closest to her such as Isabel Bonus, other friends and the ghillies and guides who
accompanied her on many of her walks.
Donaldson out of the three women, covers the widest range of Scottish landscapes and
locations. Island locations include Eigg, Skye, Oransay, Colonsay, Islay, Jura and Iona. From
the Highlands there are photographs of Kintyre, Kintail, Wester Ross, Appin, Arisaig, Glen
Affric, Lochaline, Loch Linnhe, Ballachuilish, Kingussie, Glen Affric, Roy Bridge,
Knapdale, Morvern, down into the Trossachs.
Her work is held by two archives, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, who hold her
landscape photography and the National Library of Scotland who holds her portraiture
photographs. Donaldson’s landscape photography mirrors author Nan Shepherd’s [18931981] writing, where the experience of the landscape is a physical and psychological journey
‘into’ (in Shepherd's case, the Cairngorms) rather than merely a simple passage over.
Donaldson’s landscapes are not composed as passive views to be looked at; they are to be
journeyed into. The photographs circle lochans, dip into glens and cross plateaus. In
particular ‘In Glen Carrich’ has a sequence of photographs that show the terrain unfolding.
The eye traces the route in front of the camera, spotting the gap in the stones in the
foreground, cutting round the corner of a rocky mound, tracking left around the hill with the
three trees to the hidden landscape beyond. In others, a device such as a meandering burn, an
intermittent path or rough track takes you further into the photograph. Donaldson wrote:
‘Certainly to a lover of the wild, the monotony of a level stretch of high road, with its dull,
even surface, doubles the distance, while the interest of a constantly varied and often illdefined track, full of surprises and with a marked individuality, seems actually to halve the
distance.’ [21]
Donaldson’s portraits also express the figure’s relationship to their surroundings, whether
photographs of villagers, or those she employed to accompany her over the terrain of the
highlands. Rather than the staged photographs of Walter Blaikie [1847-1928], where he asked
Hebridean islanders to re-perform a certain task to camera, Donaldson frames the subjects
with her photographs really as part of their surroundings. Whether they either have a long
way to go or want to get as close as they can to the landscape, both categories really inhabit
the land. In one example, there is a profile view of a seaweed gatherer, bent double with the
weight of the load he carries in a basket on his back. A second image from the sequence
shows his figure in the middle distance. He is on the beach, framed by rocks in the
6
foreground, and showing the contours of the island of Rum behind. By reducing the scale of
the figure, the viewer can see how far he must walk, and therefore the physicality and
difficulty of his labour. Another photograph shows the ghillie John Mackenzie, lying
horizontal on rocks, to drink from the Red Burn. The informality of this photograph, as he
lies like Narcissus, is again in contrast to the norm in Victorian photography of people
formally seated or standing.
This interconnectedness between people and place can also be seen in Gilbertson’s work. Her
editing and inter-titles consistently make the connection, for example, ‘Out of the sea comes
the crofter’s dinner’, shows men line-fishing for flounders in ‘A Crofter’s Life on Shetland’
(1931).
For Donaldson, the photographs, in particular her landscape photography, were linked to the
walks themselves, and her need to engage her mind and body in this task. Also, highly
religious, Donaldson viewed her walks into the landscape as a way to commune with her
Creator. The sharpness in focus of Donaldson’s photographs, which she processed herself,
encourages a level of active looking. From her photographs in the Cuillins, the lines of the
ravines on the flanks of the mountains in the background are as precise as the sheen of the
wet stones of the plateau that gently coruscate in the foreground. Nan Shepherd describes a
changing the focus of the eye, and the ego, to see the landscape anew: ‘As I watch, it arches
its back and each layer of landscape bristles… Details are no longer part of a grouping of a
picture around which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere… This is how the
earth must see itself.’[22] Donaldson’s photographs of landscape also encapsulate this shift of
the ego from the person to land. Perhaps out of the three women, her work most represents an
‘embodied’ knowledge, which arises through the physical experience of the terrain.
Motivations
Each woman had a different motivation for photographing and filming. For Gilbertson, it was
primarily to educate and to inform about the way of life on Shetland. From a draft of an
unpublished essay ‘A Fetlar Wedding’ written in 1931, she defines her motivations for
making her first film ‘A Crofter’s Life on Shetland’ (1931) as follows:
“My reason for being in Shetland just now is to make a film of the islands that I may at some
later date enlighten the uneducated masses in “the South” who are under the impression that
Shetlanders are hardly yet out of the wood and skin stage and that the boat (if there is one)
calls at St Kilda first”. [23]
‘The South’ is a phrase used by Shetlanders for anyone residing below Shetland, so includes
Orkney, Scottish mainland and England. This spirited comment defines her motivations in
opposition to factors that compelled her throughout her filmmaking career – to tell an
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authentic story about rural communities. Gilbertson wished to give a picture of Shetlanders
that was informed rather than sweeping. Her films fairly represented those who lived there,
showing people and location carefully, rather than create a hackneyed or romantic view of the
enchantment of island life. Whilst a number of other films of the period such as Werner
Kissling’s ‘Eriskay – a Poem of Remote Lives’ (1935) re-iterate remoteness, with its
voiceover and titles calling these ‘isles of enchantment’ and ‘distant’, Gilbertson deftly
widens the range of her film. Rather than focusing purely on crofting life, cutting it loose
from modern time as the sole subject of a film, she places its scenes of farming and everyday
life and labour alongside sequences of a more fashionable life in Shetland’s capital Lerwick.
The film shows cars trying to navigate the tight corners of narrow streets and a flapper in a
leather coat walking down the main street. Exploring alternative ideas of remoteness, the film
includes ‘the loneliest men in Britain’ and the changing of the uniformed guards of the
shoreline, the lighthouse keepers at Muckle Flugga. Kissling prefers to keep a romantic view
of the islanders for the film audiences as if the crofters of Eriskay are trapped in time and
mist: ‘little has changed in this corner of Gaeldom’. He shows the islanders involved in the
same activities as Gilbertson does, carding the wool and spinning, bringing in the peats, or
men and women working together on the land. However this activity is referred to as a
‘primitive life’, where the islanders are ‘content with what they own and are happy to work
the meagre soil’. The narrative that Gilbertson applies is quite different. The language she
uses is not placing a reading or presuming to give an overview of the islanders, rather to bring
out points of interest for the audience. Sometimes it is a statement of fact, or giving a further
bit of information to the visuals such as ‘the herring gull – first to lay and first to hatch’ or
‘Many girls leave their crofts for a few months to gut fish’.
In her diary [24] she aligns her motivation to capture the reality of crofters and their lives
with the opinion of the Shetlanders themselves, by noting down a debate a group of men were
having on the very subject:
‘Came down to the shop where most of the men on the island were congregated, Jamsie in a
pink scarf towering over them all. They had a controversy about what Shetlanders know of
other places and how little the south knows of Shetland. One man left London for Lerwick
and disappeared – at the end of a fortnight they found him in the Hebrides still looking for
Lerwick. Jamsie can’t understand it. “Doo hesna been in Cornwall or Devon,” he said to one
of the other men. “No”. “But doo has read in books or keens what doo would expec’ ta
find”.- “Yes!!!” – “Weel why is it not the sam vice versa?”
The islanders’ understanding of the wider world is also backed up in Gilbertson’s diary,
where she details how a number of the islanders she is filming on different crofts have
emigrated at one point and returned. ’13 April: Went down to Hubie this afternoon to see if
there was any ploughing. I had heard of someone ploughing with four ponies – I found the
man’s brother who was carting seaweed up to the farmyard. .. He has been in most countries
8
and 20 years in Australia in a lumber camp and helping another brother with a dairy farm’.
She also comments in her diary on Andrew Manson, who she filmed again for ‘A Crofter’s
Life on Shetland’, ploughing a field this time with an ox and pony ploughing together: ‘When
a young man he was five years in New York, and has seen much of the world as a sailor – 28
years ago he came home, married and settled on a croft.’ [25].
The movement of islanders is also interestingly recorded in Margaret Fay Shaw’s biography
notes for Peigi MacRae, who travelled from South Uist to Shetland one summer to gut fish:
‘Shetland to Peigi was beautiful, green, green and no heather!’ [26]. As well as noting the
difference in terrain, Peigi notes the difference of carrying creels: ‘The Shetland women were
very nice, going home with a creel of peats on their back held with a strap across their
forehead and always knitting, knitting as they walked about.’ In ‘A Crofter’s Life on
Shetland’ (1931), the women are shown taking turns to wash each other down from fish
scales at the end of the day. This practice is also described in Peigi MacRae’s biography
notes: ‘When finished she would stand in a tub with her oilskins and boots and the others
would rinse her off with salt water to be clean for the next day and she would have to do that
for the other ones’. It is lovely to note that whilst there is no evidence that Shaw visited
Shetland, Peigi MacRae did.
For Margaret Fay Shaw, her aim of her photography was to capture the authenticity and
source that this community represented. The ‘source’ is the singer, the landscape, language,
stories and lives. Martin Padget in his book ‘Photographers of the Western Isles’ [27] notes
Shaw’s quest for authenticity, referencing the first occasion Shaw heard a Gaelic song, sung
by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (1857-1930) [28] and wishing that she could hear the song in its
raw state sung by the original island singers. [29] Magdalena Sagarzazu, retired Canna House
Archivist and Shaw’s ‘amanuensis’ believes that the photographs cannot be viewed alone
without relating them to music and culture; they sit holistically within a wider context. This is
borne out through Shaw’s pencil notations of the songs, held as part of the Canna House
archive, as well as the final transcriptions in Shaw’s ‘Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist’
where tune, words and sometimes composition are attributed to those who appear in her
photographs from the Glendale community. For example, ‘Óran Fogarraich – An Exile’s
Song’: ‘The tune, chorus and first verse from Miss Peigi MacRae, the second and third verses
from Angus John Campbell.’ [30] Shaw records for most songs how the singer learnt the
song: ‘Miss Macrae learnt the song from Miss Catriona MacIntosh while employed at
Boisdale House when a young girl’. [31] The excellent online resource ‘Tobar an Dualchais’
contains original recordings of songs sung by Màiri MacRae and Peigi MacRae, that were
recorded at a later date by Campbell and Shaw when recording equipment was available. It
also contains an extract of a song ‘Oran a' Chutaidh’, sung by Donald MacRae, about a dog.
9
Shaw learnt Gaelic in order to be able to transcribe song at its source. Donaldson only picked
up some Gaelic at a later stage. Gilbertson’s notes and diaries suggest that she had a good
understanding of the Shetland dialect, notating any dialogue she has with Shetlanders’ in their
own tongue.
Representation of Highlanders and islanders
Brian Winston, in ‘The Documentary Film Book’ refers to the ethics of the relationship
between subject and object, and the representation of the ‘native’ as ‘Griersonian victim
documentary’ [32]. In particular he coins this phrase, citing the subjects as often not giving
their permission, nor understanding what their contribution was or what would occur from the
exposure of their lives to a wider audience. Gilbertson, Shaw and Donaldson’s approaches
would suggest they worked in an alternative way to this approach. Gilbertson records her
methods of asking for permissions in her diary. Often word of mouth has reached crofts
before she does, on what she is doing.
Through Margaret Fay Shaw’s photography of the MacRae sisters, both in their fifties whilst
Campbell was photographing them, she captured women who had key roles in their
community. Indeed, looking through the South Uist photographs, capturing them and their
neighbours, both men and women, working the land, looking after the animals, then at
leisure, the photographs communicate a non-hierarchical and secure community with men
and women represented as equals. She portrays men with the same sympathy and sensitivity
that she detects in women. Màiri MacRae was a single parent, a potentially difficult path at
that time, but her place in her own society is established and a given. She is the main subject
of Shaw’s photography, with Shaw capturing her in different moods and roles.
Both Shaw and John Lorne Campbell were drawn to authenticity, hearing Gaelic song and
language at its source and in its raw form and dialect, unmediated by dictionaries which
academically regulated the language or by translators who claimed Gaelic song for
themselves. Shaw fastidiously credited in her book ‘Folksongs and Folklore in South Uist’,
who sang the songs as she transcribed them, and often whom they had learned the songs
from. The ownership remains firmly with North Glendale. Photographs in the archives at
Canna House show the sisters with a paste-up of Shaw’s book, outside their cottage in North
Glendale. They also appear in family photographs held by Canna House continuing to visit
Shaw and Campbell in the following decades. Shaw cited that the MacRae sisters taught her
more than any university could have, and was buried alongside them in South Uist. The
Archives at Canna House also hold Shaw’s biographical notes on Peigi MacRae.
Their work is by no means romantic nor nostalgic. Gilbertson shows modernity being as
much a part of Shetland as life on the croft. There are seaplanes landing; a fashionable
woman walks down Lerwick main street, and a car tries to weave its way through the narrow
streets. Màiri MacRae enjoys a drink in one of the photographs with her neighbours outside.
10
A contemporary, such as Kissling, in an Eriskay Poem, emphasises phrases to describe the
island as ‘remote’, whereas Gilbertson does not strand the crofting community she focuses on
from the wider world. The storyline of ‘A Shetland Lyric’ is a couple deciding whether to
emigrate or stay, both holding a different opinion on the matter. Their work is ego-less too.
Kissling’s film ‘An Eriskay Poem’ begins with him sailing in to the island community on a
white yacht, a key protagonist in distinction to the poor islanders. Gilbertson appears in front
of the camera in ‘A Crofter’s Life’, half way through the film, to be suspended by a rope in
order to capture footage of some cormorant’s eggs in a nest which lies on a ledge out of reach
by normal means.
Wider Context
Nationally
Gilbertson, Shaw and Donaldson were not alone in this interest of everyday life and the rural
working class. They were also not alone in being privileged middle class making work about
the working class. Regarding film-making, the British Documentary Movement, led by John
Grierson was at the forefront establishing the G.P.O. Library of documentary films
‘recording real life and real people’. Grierson’s film ‘The Drifters’ (1929) was partially
filmed in Shetland. [33] Grierson also advised the Films of Scotland committee, formed in
order to deliver seven films about different aspects of the national identity, to be presented at
the 1938 Empire exhibition in Glasgow.
In Scotland, in terms of photography, leading up to and including the period of 1930s’,
Werner Kissling (1895-1968) captured the traditional customs and ways of working of
communities in particular the crofters of Eriskay and South Uist. Robert Moyes Adam, a
scientist from Edinburgh, photographed the islands of Harris and Scarp in the 1930s, leading
on from his work on Barra and Mingulay. Earlier photographers such as Cherry Kearton
(1871-1940) and Richard Kearton included the Hebrides and St Kilda in their work; whilst
Richard Adamson and David Octavius Hill took the earliest plates in 1845 of fishermen’s
wives and their families in Newhaven. Shaw’s nemesis [34], Alasdair Alpin MacGregor
[1899-1970] was writing and photographing in the Hebrides in the 1930s’ and’40s too. In
terms of women photographers, Margaret Watkins [1884-1969] focused on scenes of
industrial Glasgow in the 1930s’ and advertising photography. An earlier photographer
Isabella Bird [1831-1904] made trips to the Hebrides and wrote several articles for Quarterly
Review about the plight of the crofters.
Internationally
The Worker-Photography movement in the 1920s and 30s’ had been established in Germany
and the USSR and then spread to Europe as a call to amateur and worker photographers to
record everyday life and the conditions that people were working in. This was a Communist11
affiliated movement and the antithesis of the agenda of the British Documentary Movement.
Whilst the Worker-Photography Movement was backed by a ‘system of alternative media
networks such as the one established by Willi Munzenberg, whose weekly ArbeiterIllustrierete Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated News) was at its peak, the second-most-read
periodical in Germany’ [35], Grierson’s British Documentary Movement was more the norm.
Backed by conglomerates and government, the disseminated images of labour were keenly
linked to government message and economics. [36]
Internationally, government initiatives were significant commissioners of documentary
photography and film-making, in particular in the inter-war years in USA. Following the
Wall Street Crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression which saw millions of rural
farmers becoming migrants on the move, both social documentary film and photography
were focused on this human disaster. ‘The Plow That Broke The Plains’ (1936), written and
edited by Pare Lorentz, (1905-1992) is a documentary film with a message, illustrating how
farming on an industrial scale changed the nature of the Great Plains region of the USA,
turning the land into the Dust Bowl and the dispossession of those farming it. Roosevelt, as
part of his New Deal Programme of Relief, Recovery and Reform, had employed Lorentz to
the Resettlement Administration, initially as a film consultant, then to make this film. Paul
Strand [1890-1976], later in the 1950s to spend three months in the footsteps of Margaret Fay
Shaw on South Uist, was the cameraman for this film. Strand in an interview with Paul Hill
and Thomas Joshua Cooper in 1974 [37] recalled in particular the impact of Roy Emerson
Stryker’s commissioning at Farm Security Administration, another government initiative,
where he assigned documentary photographers including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans,
Marion Post Wolcott, Louise Rosskam, Ben Shahn and others, ‘...who went out to
photograph people during that period when there was so much suffering. Every one of those
photographers had an assignment. They were not given a camera and told: ‘Here, go out and
make some pictures of what you like’. No, not at all. They were sent out to take photographs
of the dust storms and the displacement of thousands of people, who because of the storms,
became migrant workers.’ [38] Strand directly aligns this commissioning with the strength of
the tradition of social documentary photography in USA over that period. In the 1930s Strand
focused mostly on film, making ‘Redes (The Wave)’ (1936), about the fragility of a rural
Mexican fishing community, whose life and fortunes are dictated by poverty, nature and the
greed of the managing classes.
Grierson is attributed by BFI screenonline to being influenced by an earlier film directed by
Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler ‘Manhatta’ (1921) which presents the modernity of
Manhattan ‘in a poetic manner’ [39]. Whereas Strand focuses on the injustice of
industrialisation of rural labour, Grierson in his film ‘Drifters’(1929), emphasises how
industrialisation is a positive force, closing on the fish being brought back for sale to an
international market. The title card at the beginning of ‘Drifters’ reads: ‘The Herring fishing
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industry has changed. Its story was once an idyll of brown sails and village harbours – its
story is now an epic of steel and steam. Fishermen still have their homes in the old time
village – But they go down for each season to the labour of a modern industry.’
In comparing the motivations of Strand, Grierson and Gilbertson all had an emphasis on
education of the public. Both Strand and Grierson were government or corporation
sponsored; Strand initially through New Deal work, only becoming independent and forming
a film co-operative in the swing in Congress in 1936 from Democrat to Republican. Grierson
following his Rockefeller Fellowship returned to Great Britain in 1927 believing that film
could be a tool to communicate a national message following the Great Depression, in
essence a form of propaganda, working at the governmental agency of the Empire Marketing
Board, which disbanded in 1933 as the businesses and trade it promoted struggled because of
the Depression, moving to the GPO.
Gilbertson, however, was independent, neither belonging to a co-operative nor backed by
government money and agenda. She wrote about herself, ‘My films in Shetland and Canada
have always been a one-woman job – camera work, wild track sound, lighting, directing,
script-writing etc.’ [40]. Gilbertson repeatedly puts all the capital into making her films.
Where income is noted, it never meets expenditure, either leaving her out of pocket or with
very low income. Gilbertson notes on one of the most significant purchases of five films by
John Grierson for the G.P.O. Film Library, that ‘J.G.’s offer for the films was £40, which I,
poor mutt, accepted. However, I did, and still do, have the right to have copies for my own
use’. [41].
Conclusions
Sarah Neely writes about Gilbertson, and another Scottish film maker Isobel Wylie
Hutchinson (1889-1982):
‘... with both filmmakers, it is sometimes difficult, considering their commitment to capturing
the rhythms of the everyday, to understand their lack of engagement with wider political and
social issues faced by the communities they filmed.’ [42]
This comment is made in relation to Gilbertson but can be expanded out to Margaret Fay
Shaw and MEM Donaldson. Neither of these women used photography and film to comment
on poverty, or that the rural population in Scotland being affected by the Great Depression
which hit Britain during the 1930s’. However, all three had an awareness or involvement in
politics and wider conditions. Gilbertson in her autobiographical notes mentions that in her
twenties she had an ‘enthusiastic support of the Labour Party.’ [43]. The Archive also holds
some of her father’s effects that Gilbertson had kept, including a leaflet entitled ‘Crofter’s
Holdings (Scotland Act, 1886)’. Margaret Fay Shaw’s husband John Lorne Campbell
established the Sea League with Compton Mackenzie, self-publishing and lobbying UK
13
Government in order to close the Minch to Norwegian and Icelandic trawlers who they saw
as jeopardizing the Hebrideans’ traditional methods of fishing. Mackenzie, very much part of
Shaw and Campbell’s circle, particularly in their early years of living on Barra, was a founder
member of Scottish National Party. Donaldson, in particular in her book ‘Scotland’s
Suppressed History (1935), a diatribe against Presbyterianism and secular society, was more
concerned with religion and the state of Scotland. Why was it, given the awareness of all
three of wider contexts, that neither their film nor photography work shows this? All were
independent, so not making work for the government or sponsored by companies, as some of
their male counterparts were. Their aims and motivations were all placed on different
emphasis. Gilbertson aimed for her films to educate, and discount the stereotype of the
islander, in the eyes of a national audience. Shaw learnt Gaelic in order to be able to
understand and transcribe the songs and ways of one small community, North Glendale, at its
source, recording both people and place over a six year immersion. Shaw does refer to
‘scarcity’ in ‘Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist’, relating that the women, ‘never
complained of the scarcity of the many things the townsfolk are unable to do without. Nor in
those black depression years did they ever voice the worry for their mensfolk waiting
interminably for a ship in a faraway city’. Shaw therefore observes the people and their
attitude towards their situation rather than the poverty, in her photographs. [44] MEM
Donaldson recorded through portraits and landscape photography of her network and
neighbours, the close relationship of people as well as her own, to the land. Whilst, as Neely
points out, the work of Gilbertson is not political, it could equally be said that the work of
Gilbertson, Shaw and Donaldson meets more the feminist maxim of ‘the personal is the
political’. This can be seen in the ways Donaldson finds her own emancipation in the
landscape, or Shaw documents the strength of women who would likely have been
overlooked by wider society, or Gilbertson’s films give equality to Shetland islanders through
the depth of her portraits of them. One of the key aspects of their practice is the element of
time. All three women immersed themselves in the communities and places they were
documenting.
To conclude, three events, witnessed by each. A diary entry of Gilbertson’s from Feb 1931
reads:
‘On the Monday night a meteor the size of the moon and lighting up the place so that one
could pick up a pin; passed in a red flash above Rona’s Hill east and disappeared as
suddenly as it appeared, vanishing in a blue burst of smoke when it hit the atmosphere’. [45]
In a 30 May 1931 diary entry, when on her five week visit, cooking for shepherds on the
deserted island of Mingulay, Shaw writes, ‘I stand in the door, watching the mist turn pink,
then turn grey and the moon shines pale through it’. [46]
14
MEM Donaldson walks out into the landscape of Eigg in mid-summer and stays up all night:
‘I never saw anything more fascinating than the unfolding beauties of the dawn following
upon the pale night. Rum and Skye both looked like dream fortresses of grey stone, and the
plaint of the seabirds came across the water like the cry from the world of spirits’. [47]
Jenny Brownrigg (2016)
Footnotes
[1] P.92, ‘Another Way of Telling’, BERGER, J. MOHR, J (1982) Writers and Readers
Publishing Co-operative Society Ltd.
[2] Jenny Gilbertson was born in Glasgow to Mary Dunn Brown (1972-1957) and William
Brown (1868-1952), the latter, an iron and steel merchant in Glasgow. Margaret Fay Shaw
had an ancestral connection to Scotland through emigration. Her forbearer, her great-great
grandfather John Shaw had left Scotland for Philadelphia in 1792. MEM Donaldson was born
in England and brought up in Surrey. Like Shaw, Donaldson also a Scottish ancestral
connection.
[3] GILBERTSON, J. Autobiography draft, Chapter 1 ‘The Growing Years’, (Box 11,
Shetland Museum & Archives)
[4] Letter from MEM Donaldson to Marion Lochhead, dated ‘Saint Columba’s Day 1929’.
Acc. 12251/49, National Library of Scotland
[5] Whilst there is no evidence the three women knew each other in the 1930s’ , Compton
Mackenzie, a friend of Shaw and her husband John Lorne Campbell’s, satirized MEM
Donaldson in his 1940 book ‘Hunting the Fairies’. He re-casts Donaldson as a male poet,
living with his sister at ‘The house of two hearts’. Donaldson lived with a female companion
Isabel Bonus. The architecture of the poet’s home in ‘Hunting the fairies’ matches that of
Donaldson’s unique home and building project at Sanna Bheag, where she incorporated the
black house design into a modern low-rise complete with photography studio. It would not be
too much to claim, that given the subject matter of the book and Mackenzie being a close
friend of Shaw’s husband, that she would have read the book and understood the characters.
[6] Gilbertson CV notes (Box 3, Shetland Museum & Archives).
[7] Gilbertson, Autobiography notes (Box 3, Shetland Museum & Archives).
[8] Ibid.
15
[9] Typescript by John Grierson, accompanying letter dated 10/2/32 to Jenny Gilbertson (Box
5, Shetland Museum & Archives).
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] GILBERTSON, J. ‘Notes for talks with films’ (Box 3, Shetland Museum & Archives).
[13] Letter to the editor, The Leopard, Aberdeen 22.4.1982, Box 1, Shetland Museum &
Archives.
[14] Letter dated 19 Jan 1989, from Jenny Gilbertson to Mr. Shackell (Box 4, Shetland
Museum & Archives)
[15] Ibid.
[16] Following the death of her parents, Margaret Fay Shaw went to boarding school at St
Brides School in Helensburgh in 1921. Later, she went on a summer cycling tour of the
Highlands and Islands with two friends, which included cycling through Glencoe, Skye and
the Outer Hebrides.
[17] P.10, ‘The Outer Hebrides: Margaret Fay Shaw’, SHAW, M.F. Undated. Typescript
held at the National Trust for Scotland Canna House. (CH1/1/2)
[18] P.32, ‘A Different Country: The Photographs of Werner Kissling’, RUSSELL, M.
(2002), Birlinn Ltd.
[19] P.3, SHAW, M.F. ‘Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist’, 2nd Ed. (2005), Birlinn Ltd.
[20] P.21, ‘The Outer Hebrides: Margaret Fay Shaw’, SHAW, M.F. Undated. Typescript
held at the National Trust for Scotland Canna House. (CH1/1/2)
[21] P.142, ‘Wanderings of the Western Isles’, DONALDSON, M.E.M. (1921) Alexander
Gardner, Paisley.
[22] P.10-11, ‘The Living Mountain’, SHEPHERD, N. (2011) 3rd Ed. Canongate Books.
[23] ‘A Fetlar Wedding’ typescript (1931), GILBERTSON, J. (Box 9, Shetland Museum &
Archives)
[24] GILBERTSON, J. Shetland Diary Jan-Jul 1931, entry dated 12 April. (ref 4/6/10,
Moving Image Archive, National Library for Scotland).
[25] 2nd April entry, Ibid.
16
[26] P.77, Peigi MacRae, biography notes, SHAW, M.F. National Trust for Scotland Canna
House (CHMFS/1/2/1).
[27] P.126, ‘Photographers of the Western Isles’, PADGET, M. (2010) John Donald, an
imprint of Birlinn Ltd.
[28] Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser was a professional Scottish singer, composer and arranger.
Including songs she transcribed from Eriskay, Kennedy-Fraser made three volumes of ‘Songs
from the Hebrides’, published between 1909-1921.
[29] P.126, Photographers of the Western Isles’, PADGET, M. (2010) John Donald, an
imprint of Birlinn Ltd.
[30] P.5, ‘South Uist in Sound’, SHAW, M.F. undated. Typescript held by National Trust for
Scotland Canna House (CH1/1/2/1/7)
[31] P.96, ‘Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist’, SHAW, M.F. (205) 2nd Ed. Birlinn Ltd.
[32] P.11, ‘The Documentary Film Book’, WINSTON, B. (213) Palgrave MacMillan
[33] Jenny Gilbertson recalls in her diary in an entry on 5 Feb 1931, going to see ‘Drifters’ in
the ‘picture house’ in Lerwick, a place she describes as having ‘horrible pink washed walls
and glaring naked electric lights’. She goes on to write down an anecdote she had heard from
locals,’... looking at the sea now at the bottom and now at the top of the screen, one
understands the tale that tells how the cameraman after the first ten minutes took no more
pictures until back in Bressay Sound.’ GILBERTSON, J. Shetland Diary Jan-Jul 1931, (ref
4/6/10, Moving Image Archive, National Library for Scotland).
[34] Alasdair Alpin MacGregor had an on-going spat with Shaw, her husband John Lorne
Campbell and Compton Mackenzie, over their differing perspectives on how Hebridean
islanders were depicted. This came later to a head following the publishing of MacGregor’s
book ‘The Western Isles’ (1949, Robert Hale Publishers) where MacGregor called the
islanders lazy.
[35] ‘A Hard, Merciless Light: The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1939’, Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Devin Fore
[36] It should be noted that women were involved in both the Worker-Photography
Movement and the British Documentary movement. Tina Modotti [1896-1942], Irena
Bluhova [1904-1991], Kata Kalman [1909-1978], Judith Karasz [1912-1977] and Eva
Besnyo [1910-2003] were involved in Worker-Photography, whilst Grierson’s own sisters
Ruby Grierson [1904-1940] and Marion Grierson [1907-1998] worked with him at the Film
Unit. Marion Grierson produced and edited, whilst Ruby Grierson directed ‘London Wakes
17
Up’ (1936), and was un-credited assistant on ‘Housing Problems’ (d. Arthur Elton / Edgar
Anstey, 1935) where she directly worked with the working class women interviewees. Evelyn
Spice Cherry, also a collaborator of Gilbertson’s on ‘Prairie Winter’ (1934), began working
for Grierson’s Government Post Film Unit in 1931. She went on to be placed in charge of
National Film Board’s agricultural film unit in 1941.
[37] ‘Dialogue with Photography’, HILL, P. & Cooper, T (2005), Dewi Lewis Publishing
[38] P.14, Ibid.
[39] www.screenonline.org.uk
[40] GILBERTSON, J. CV notes (Box 3, Shetland Museum & Archives)
[41] GILBERTSON, J. Autobiographical notes (Box 3, Shetland Museum & Archives)
[42] ‘My Heart Beat for the Wilderness’: Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Jenny Gilbertson,
Margaret Tait, and other Twentieth-Century Scottish Film-makers’, NEELY, S. (2014). In:
MacKenzie S, Westerstahl Stenport A (ed.). Films on Ice: Cinema of the Arctic. Traditions in World
Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 299-309
[43] GILBERTSON, J, Autobiography draft, begun 21.5.1987, Chapter 1: ‘The Growing Up
Years’. (Box 11, Shetland Archives & Museum).
[44] GILBERTSON, J. Shetland Diary Jan-Jul 1931. (ref 4/6/10, Moving Image Archive,
National Library for Scotland).
[45] SHAW, M.F. diary, Fri 30 May 1931 National Trust for Scotland Canna House
(CHMFS/1/4/1/4)
[46] P.259, ‘Wanderings of the Western Isles’, DONALDSON, M.E.M. (1921) Alexander
Gardner, Paisley.
18